As Chester and I walked away from Olive’s desk, I could feel her eyes on the back of my suit, like a child with a magnifying glass trying to set ants on fire. I ignored her and felt the fire grow hotter. I breathed in: floral, woody, aldehydic—a smell I would always associate from that point on with rosy serenity in the face of irrational hate.
As I sat in Chester’s office and listened to his revisions of the work I’d done that morning on our new campaign, I thought about how Olive, even after years, still did not understand the most basic principles of what we did. Good advertising had to be genuine, joyful, unforced. To write informal copy, we had to be informal—to forget motives and mechanisms for a moment and simply speak to the public in the voice we might use to greet an acquaintance encountered on the sidewalk. The instant Olive took pen in hand, she stiffened up. She wrote drafts that left her humiliated because she permitted herself to be humiliated, revealed as fundamentally phony. As Chester tore through my first drafts with abundant blue-pencil edits, I felt no humiliation. That was the process. Nobody’s first cracks were perfect. Olive thought mine were, but she didn’t see how hard I worked. How I loved this job, but how it wasn’t easy for me.
Especially—though I hated to admit it to myself—lately. My mind was on other things, like my upcoming move to the Village. I was excited about that, truly. But increasingly I’d come to wonder if this was it. Though my achievements—professional, literary—were sweet, it was hard not to be conscious of the gaps between these successes and what I’d imagined of them, and hard, too, to see what route to take now that I had won almost everything I had wanted. From the peak, of course, all paths lead down.
I was still at the top of my advertising game. Still making plenty of money. And it was a glorious summer, so far, in the city, with liquor once again flowing freely.
But recently, even on the hottest nights, I couldn’t fall asleep without being covered up, couldn’t quite rest without at least the lightest sheet settled lightly over me. In my mind, I’d come to see it as the physical remedy for a vulnerability I’d begun to feel—a material attempt to ward off my own light sheet of anxiety, ever-present, ever-covering.
12
A Fireman’s Axe and a Dracula Cape
In certain instances, walking alone in Manhattan is actually safer at night.
Passing by the Strand, for example, at Twelfth and Broadway. I usually walk past that bookstore with intense ambivalence: delight because I have been frequenting it since the 1930s, when it was over on Fourth Avenue, just one among nearly fifty similar shops; dread because on more than one occasion in the past two decades I have found my own poetry collections derelict on the sidewalk carts, on sale for mere cents, and with no one watching over them because if they get stolen, well, who cares? At night, at least, the carts have been rolled away and there’s no chance I’ll be confronted with evidence of my grim literary fate.
The Strand is something like two miles behind me now. I am making good time, nearing Lower Manhattan. Feeling the simple satisfaction of a well-executed plan, as I am close to Delmonico’s and beginning to feel peckish.
Broadway takes me west of Little Italy, but among my fellow pedestrians I find many hints of its closeness: dapper hats and open collars, boxes of pastry wrapped tightly in twine, a brash and urgent music in voices—both Italian and Chinese, who increasingly are the actual inhabitants of the neighborhood. I think of how many times I came here with Max to meet his parents—when we were first involved, and also when they’d visit the city on weekends to see Johnny, their only grandchild. Back when I met Max, I was surprised and disappointed that his parents didn’t reside in Little Italy, but, rather, in New Jersey—Rutherford, where they’d been for years, Max living with them. Little Italy, I learned, was really Little Naples, and Max’s parents were northerners, Milanese. They also had the deeply held, received idea—received from friends and neighbors, and the parents of friends and neighbors, who remembered a time when Mulberry Street was the worst of Manhattan’s slums—and also, to be sure, received from advertising—that success meant to pass through the city quickly and settle in the suburbs.
Within a couple of blocks, the foot traffic has thinned almost to nothing. This part of the walk—approaching the financial district, emptied for the holiday—feels like passing through a ghost town or the backlot of a movie studio. I am the only moving figure in sight.